There is perhaps no part of the world where the West has interfered with such deadly ignorance and condescension as it has in the Middle East. The essentially patronizing Western attitude toward the region has been epitomized by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair whose part in instigating the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq will inevitably constitute the centrepiece of the inquiry into the causes of the Iraq war, led by the sometime civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, which began its deliberations in London last month.
The Iraq war might never have taken place at all had not Blair’s view of the Arab and Muslim worlds been scarcely less ill-informed and devoid of human sympathy than that of ex-US President George W. Bush. Bush had not even grasped that there is a distinction between Sunnis and Shiites. Nor is it certain that the sharp but shallow Blair could have greatly enhanced the president’s understanding of such matters, even if he had not been preoccupied with demonstrating Britain’s boundless willingness to do Washington’s bidding.
Arguably, the truly urgent need is for an inquiry into the roots of the West’s superiority complex in relation to the peoples of the Middle East. For the signs are that it is as entrenched and potentially pernicious as ever. Blair’s own enduring condescension toward the Arab world is underlined by the fact that he assumed the role of the West’s “Middle East envoy”, charged with the monumental task of working toward a resolution of the Palestine-Israel conflict, on a part-time basis. And to measure how rife the condescension in question remains in Britain’s corridors of power, consider the composition of the Chilcot inquiry panel. Though centrally concerned with the issue why, in probable breach of international law, Britain declared pre-emptive war against an Arab state, it not only includes no legal expert but no one who could said to represent the Arab point of view.
On the other hand the five-person panel does include the Jewish historians Sir Lawrence Freedman and Sir Martin Gilbert, both of whom supported the invasion of Iraq. It was Freedman who composed Blair’s lauded 1999 Chicago speech expounding the doctrine of “liberal intervention” and providing a rationale for “pre-emption”. Gilbert, for his part, is a zealous Zionist and staunch defender of Bush and Blair, who predicted that they would be revered in the same heroic terms as Roosevelt and Churchill. The involvement in what purports to be an impartial inquiry of two such palpably parti pris figures would matter less had the panel found room for one or two people whose stance vis-à-vis the Middle East furnished a counterbalance. Even on the most charitable interpretation, the Chilcot panel was hardly chosen with conspicuous respect for Arab sensitivities.
Yet it is only because there is so much residual public anger over the Iraq war that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown sanctioned a new inquiry at all. Ministers maintained that there had already been four previous inquiries about Iraq and that there was no further light to be thrown on the question of why Tony Blair led his country to war on the pretext that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be rapidly deployed against it. Those in the British political establishment and media who remain loyal to Blair assert that his critics are pursuing a witch-hunt against a politician who, far from exaggerating the threat posed by the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, as they allege, acted “in good faith”, on the basis of the available intelligence. The vengefulness of his critics, they protest, will never be appeased.
It is, to be sure, unlikely that Blair’s more extreme opponents will be appeased by the Chilcot inquiry, which has no legal powers and is in many ways a mere academic exercise. There is a widespread feeling that it will simply be a protracted version of the Hutton and Butler inquiries, the two previous major, if less wide-ranging, inquiries, which found that neither Blair nor anybody else bore the smallest responsibility for the Iraq debacle. Many believe that it will end up as another official “whitewash” and that there will be no serious attempt to grapple with key issues, not least the question of how the British Cabinet came to endorse Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s endlessly finessed ruling that the Iraq war was legal, a judgement shared by few British experts on international law.
Yet if nothing else, the inquiry, which could go on for at least a year, seems certain to cause Tony Blair, who is expected to appear before it in the early part of 2010, no little discomfort. It is said that Blair has lately begun to look more haggard and careworn than ever before. It has been suggested, too, that he has genuine cause to worry about what may be divulged by the Chilcot inquiry, especially now that he has been robbed of the opportunity to become president of the European Union, in which role he would have enjoyed cast-iron legal immunity.
Certainly, much could emerge from the Chilcot inquiry, which will at the very least compound the international odium attaching to Blair’s name. Already in its first week, two leading British diplomats at the time of the war, Sir Jeremy Greenstock and Sir Christopher Meyer, have strenuously distanced themselves from the decision to use military force against Iraq, acknowledging that the war was of doubtful legitimacy and implying that responsibility for Britain’s part in it is borne by Blair alone. Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US, has rekindled suspicions that Blair secretly committed Britain to military action long before he began issuing dire warnings about Saddam Hussein’s capacity to attack Britain.
For all his exhortations that the time has come to “move on”, Tony Blair seems fated to endure the punishment of being forever haunted by the Iraq war. His predicament evokes the image of a man desperately attempting to expunge a bloodstain, only to discover that it is indelible.
